


Thirteen at Dinner

by abluestocking



Category: Agatha Christie's Miss Marple: Nemesis (TV 1987), Miss Marple - Agatha Christie
Genre: F/F, First Kiss, First Meetings, Flirting, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 12:32:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13031211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abluestocking/pseuds/abluestocking
Summary: Miss Barrow and Miss Cooke would never have met in a conventional manner.





	Thirteen at Dinner

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cefyr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cefyr/gifts).



> Dear cefyr: 
> 
> As soon as I saw that you were interested in backstories, competency, and flirting, I knew I was going to have a hell of a lot of fun writing for you. :) I hope you enjoy this story, and that you have a lovely Yuletide!
> 
>  
> 
>   
> 

They were thirteen at dinner.

The number did not bother Ann Watkins, who sat quietly halfway down the table, covertly surveying her dinner companions with a penetrating eye. She was not superstitious; never had been since she was a girl, and was unlikely to start now. Ann believed in making your own luck, and fully intended to. Even if she had to walk over the backs of every other person at this table.

“Good evening,” Lord Trueman said, beaming genially around him. “Welcome, one and all. I thought it would be pleasant to begin things with a relaxing, convivial meal - before everything kicks off and a murderer is loose among us.”

There was a polite laugh from the assembly. It was always wise to laugh at the boss’s jokes.

Trueman brought his hands together, hushing them. “And then I asked myself, since when am I pleasant?”

 _Never_ , Ann thought darkly, remembering half-a-dozen times in the past year that she had lain awake after a particularly grueling training block, applying all the ways she knew how to kill a man to Trueman’s gangly frame. 

“You’ll find your assignment in an envelope under your plate,” Trueman said. “Please try to avoid gratituous damage to the house and grounds. The owners are friends of mine.”

Up and down the table, plates were tipped up and envelopes extracted. Ann slit hers with a quick flick of her wrist and unfolded her instructions, her heart already beginning to speed up.

This was her third of Trueman’s quarterly dinners. As a pedagogical tool, they were no doubt useful for testing skills in the field, illuminating grace under pressure, revealing holes in training, and pitting trainees against each other in a more complicated scenario than usual. Ann found them delightful, exhilarating, and exhausting.

The underlying concept was rather simple. Any or all of the thirteen people around the table, including Trueman, might be a player. Some might be ringers; perhaps bureaucratic staff of the Agency, perhaps a trusted friend or family member of a senior agent. Ringers would have no assignment, but might have a persona. Players, on the other hand, all had assignments. The assignment might be anything, from “steal the Gainsborough from the library and conceal it somewhere in the grounds” to “abduct the person sitting opposite you” to “steal the plans to a battleship from Lord Trueman’s room and successfully plant them on another player without being caught”.

And one player received the primary assignment: the murder, which everyone else was trying to solve while completing their own secondary assignment.

At Ann’s first dinner, all the secondary assignments had been the same: produce Lady Trueman’s diamond necklace at the end of the two-day retreat. At her second, every assignment had been different, in some cases wildly different; she’d fought off two murder attempts before teatime, discovered a bloody dagger planted under her bed (really, Percy? What self-respecting murderer left bloody daggers under beds for the maids to find? Hidden in a crevice in the chimney would have been more believable), and then been up half the night looking for the secret passage she needed to find. She’d earned full marks in the end, unlike Percy and eight other unfortunates, who’d earned only a bollocking. 

Percy wasn’t back this time. Most of the faces around the table were unfamiliar to her. Some agents would have graduated and gone into the field, but others had no doubt decided the profession wasn’t for them (either by their own volition or not). And of course some might simply be new ringers. There was a particularly bright-faced young woman who’d been introduced as Trueman’s daughter who Ann had her eye on. 

She looked back down at her assignment, keeping it carefully hidden from her dinner companions. It wouldn’t do to give anyone the advantage of knowing her goal from the off. She read it again, committing it to memory, then rolled it into a screw and tucked it down the front of her shirt, smiling rakishly at her right-hand neighbour when he raised an eyebrow. 

“Not cricket,” he said in an undertone. “How’s a fellow supposed to steal that?”

“You’ll murder me, Giles,” Ann said, matching his eyebrow, “but not search my person? You may be too squeamish for this profession.”

He laughed. She liked him, mildly, though he wasn’t her type at all. She wondered who he had been before the Agency, before he became Giles, just as she had become Ann. Names and identities – even personalities – were ephemeral, fungible quantities in this line of work. Once upon a time she might have been a soft-hearted vicar’s daughter, or a child actress, or a brilliant academic, or a juvenile delinquent. Now she was Ann, trainee agent, and she had to find a way to steal Jenny Trueman’s earrings before dinner on the following evening.

Jenny’s earrings sparkled in the light of the chandelier as she looked up at her father with an adoring smile, and Ann suppressed a smile of her own.

This was going to be fun.

~//~

Ann loved darkness.

Perhaps in a past life she’d been a cat. Stealing through a quiet house in the dead of night never failed to send a thrill of excitement through her veins, as she slipped past every corner knowing one of her competitors might be lurking ready to murder her. So far they’d never managed – she’d never felt the cold business-end of an unloaded pistol or the loose scarf looped around her neck that meant she was ‘out’ – but there was a first time for everything.

Jenny’s room was halfway along the passage, and Ann approached it with caution, carefully skirting the massive suit of armour that was peskily on display. Now _that_ would be an ignominious clatter. She found herself hoping some other unfortunate would collide with it sometime in the night, just for the rush of schadenfreude.

Since night was such a fertile time for intrigue, Jenny might very well be out of her room, skulking somewhere else in the house. That would certainly make Ann’s task easier, if Jenny had left her earrings helpfully in her room. (Somehow she doubted it would be that easy.)

The door was locked, but Ann was an excellent lockpick. It slid open, and Ann slipped inside.

Moonlight fell on the empty bed, and Ann released a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. A quick scan of the room with her torch found no lurking Jenny, and Ann began a quick, systematic search for the earrings. They’d looked both expensive and heavy, so it was unlikely Jenny was still wearing them, wherever she was. No jewelry box on the dressing table or writing desk, no handbag lying on the chair or tucked under the pillow…

Ann had covered most of the likely places, and was brushing rapidly through Jenny’s lingerie – a popular hiding place for women – when she felt a cold hand close around her bicep.

“Like what you see?” a voice purred in her ear.

Ann’s heart stopped, turned over, and started beating again. She hadn’t heard Jenny’s approach, which either meant that she was shockingly out of form tonight or Jenny was very, _very_ good. Perhaps both, which meant, she supposed, that her earlier uncertainty about whether Jenny was a ringer or an agent had probably just been answered. 

She controlled her tone as she answered. “Silk. Very posh.”

“Well, I _am_ supposed to be the daughter of an earl,” Jenny said, taking her hand away and dropping onto the bed with languid grace. “I have standards to keep up.”

As far as Ann knew, Trueman wasn’t actually Lord Trueman at all. (Or Trueman, come to that. The nom-de-plume had always seemed a little too on the nose.) But did Jenny mean that she was Trueman’s daughter, a ringer, or Trueman’s daughter, an agent, or an agent posing as Trueman’s daughter, just as Trueman’s wife at the first dinner Ann had attended had been a particularly skilled safebreaker? 

“Where were you?” Ann asked, out of curiousity. 

Jenny smiled. She had a very pretty smile, glinting in the torchlight. “The wardrobe. I was going to give you a fright when you checked it, but when I saw you rummaging in my pants, I couldn’t resist.”

Ann looked at the wardrobe. It didn’t seem large enough to fit a person, but Jenny was quite slim. Next time she was checking the wardrobe first.

“So,” Jenny said, turning on her bedside lamp, “what were you looking for?”

She was wearing a nightdress like the type you bought for your wedding night, if you were a tasteful and not particularly gaudy bride. There was nothing completely lewd, but neither did it leave much to the imagination, all clingy fabrics and graceful curves. Ann suddenly found herself struggling to form coherent thoughts.

Jenny’s smile turned wicked. “Not _now_ ,” she said, crossing one long leg over the other, which made the nightdress shift in extremely interesting ways. “Before.”

 _Focus_. Gracious, she was as bad as one of the men. Which was probably the reason Jenny was wearing it, come to think of it. Distracting one’s fellow agents might buy precious extra seconds to escape a murder attempt. Ann approved. She’d have to visit a lingerie shop herself. Every advantage counted. 

“Well,” she said, sitting on the bed next to Jenny and letting her ankle brush against Jenny’s. Two could play this game. “I don’t know that I should tell you.”

“You’re not the murderer,” Jenny pointed out. She didn’t move away. “If you’d been here to murder me, you would have hidden, not started going through my drawers.”

“Maybe I was here for other reasons,” Ann said, watching the way the light of the lamp spread rose-dappled across Jenny’s cheeks. “Not everything has to be work all the time.”

“That line works better for you than it did for Giles,” Jenny said, smiling.

Ann smiled back until the meaning of the words hit her. “Giles was here?” Damn. Perhaps this was another one of those times where some of the secondary assignments were duplicates. The earrings might already be tucked up in Giles’s pocketbook, and getting them out of there would be difficult.

“I believe that ‘was’ is the operative word,” Jenny agreed. “I marched him back to his room at gunpoint.”

Ann looked at Jenny with redoubled respect. Giles wasn’t an easy mark. 

“My assignment is to make sure you aren’t convicted of the murder,” she said. “I’m your bodyguard, I suppose.”

Jenny considered this claim as if it had merit, which would be surprising since Ann had, of course, just invented it wholesale. “Bodyguard, alibi, or defense lawyer?”

“All three, if you like,” Ann said, then leaned slightly closer. “Whatever my lady desires.”

“Your offer is compelling,” Jenny murmured. There was a freckle just to the right of her mouth. 

“I can be very compelling,” Ann said –

And then they were kissing.

This was entirely not the plan Ann had had in mind when she had received her assignment at dinner. For one thing, she’d been leaning towards believing that Jenny was actually the boss’s daughter, playing along for fun and games, and not an actual player on the board at all. A Jenny who was an agent, who was capable of sneaking up on Ann and marching other agents around at gunpoint, and who kissed like _this_ \- well, she was a revelation.

Despite not being Ann’s original plan, however, it was an excellent notion.

Jenny’s kiss was as alluring as she was, first soft and then increasingly passionate. She nipped Ann’s bottom lip, and Ann found herself gasping into Jenny’s mouth as Jenny’s tongue traced her own. She shifted on the bed, leaning closer to Jenny, and Jenny’s hand cupped her chin, holding her steady. 

Ann should be focusing on her work. Those earrings had to be around somewhere. If she received a positive report for the third dinner in a row, she’d be sure to impress Trueman. 

But on the other hand, she certainly couldn’t look for the earrings if Jenny was suspicious, and this was as good a way as any to lull Jenny into trusting her. ( _Keep telling yourself that_ , her inner voice told her tartly. _You’re just enjoying the fact that an agent your type is hitting on you for once._ )

Jenny’s hand trailed across Ann’s shoulder, raising goosebumps on her arms, and then dipped into Ann’s cleavage, long fingers sweeping across the curve of her breast. Ann sucked in a breath, kissing Jenny with renewed intensity, and –

“Got it,” Jenny said, leaning back.

“What,” Ann said, temporarily confused.

Jenny smiled at her like a cat planning mayhem. “I saw your move at dinner, and thought I’d see if it was still there.”

Belatedly, Ann realised that Jenny was holding her assignment. Damn and blast. She made a grab for it, tipping Jenny into the bedcovers, and found herself staring down the business end of a pistol. 

“Not so fast,” Jenny said, still smiling. “Mind the gun.”

Resentfully, Ann sat back on her heels and watched Jenny unfold the paper. Jenny wouldn’t actually want to ‘shoot’ her – she’d have to make an appropriately loud noise and it would bring other people to the room, anxious to track down the ‘murderer’ – but the threat meant that she had to yield.

“Earrings,” Jenny said. Her eyes twinkled. “Why didn’t you just say that?”

“I’m not just going to _tell_ you my assignment,” Ann said, crossing her arms.

Jenny refolded the paper and handed it back ceremoniously. “If you help me, you can have the earrings.”

“Help you?” That sounded suspicious.

Jenny grinned. It was very different than her sweet smile. This had teeth. “I want to blow these dinners right out of the water.”

~//~

“Let me get this straight,” Ann said, fifteen minutes later. “You don’t just want to fulfill your assignment. You want to make sure that _nobody else_ -”

“Except my ally.”

“ – except your ally fulfills their assignment.”

“Yes,” Jenny said. She was twirling the gun between her fingers. It wasn’t safe gun etiquette, even though Ann knew it was unloaded. At least, Ann thought she knew that.

“Why?”

Jenny shrugged. “The real world doesn’t play by rules. These manor house parlour games are pleasant, but our world isn’t as tidy as a murder mystery.” Then she smiled, a sunbeam breaking through clouds. “And I want to show off to Trueman.”

Ann mulled that over. She could understand the impulse. Her own graduation was approaching; soon enough she’d be out in the field. A legendary final dinner story would be an excellent sendoff. “So how do you propose finding out what their assignments are?”

“Pardon?”

“Do we search their rooms? Run some kind of complicated con with you gaining entrance in that nightdress and then holding them at gunpoint while I frisk them?”

“Very chic,” Jenny said. “A femme fatale and her loyal lady. No, I just thought we’d murder them all.”

“Come again,” Ann said.

Jenny laughed. “Well, there’s only one ‘murderer’ assignment, correct? But there’s no official rule that says only one _murder_ can take place, or that no one except the official murderer can murder anyone.”

Ann opened her mouth to object, but upon thinking further, shut it. There wasn’t a rule. _Implied_ , certainly, but not explicit. During her previous dinners, everyone had been too focused on their own assignments to go around committing extracurricular bonus murders, but that didn’t mean it was outlawed. And wholesale bonus murder would avert the other drawback, which was that the official assigned murderer would be harder to catch if people went around solving their secondary assignments with murder. If Jenny and Ann were the only players left standing at the end, there’d be nobody to accuse them.

“I actually like it,” she said, and found herself starting to laugh.

“Good,” Jenny said. “I already killed Giles. One down, nine to go, and we only have a couple hours until daybreak. Let’s go.”

~//~

When Ann and Jenny walked into the breakfast room later that morning, Trueman was sitting alone at the head of the table, in silent contemplation of his newspaper and kippers. 

“Good morning, Father,” Jenny said, going to drop a kiss on the top of his bald pate.

Trueman set his newspaper down. “Good morning,” he said, sounding faintly suspicious. “Do you happen to know why it’s nearly ten and you two are the first I’ve seen?”

“Well,” Ann said. “It’s a long story.”

“A long story.” Trueman’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, it’s a long –”

“Surprise,” Jenny chirped in his ear, and dropped her garrotte-scarf around his neck.

Ann smiled into Trueman’s shocked face. “I believe Henry rode a motorbike here,” she told Jenny. “He was bragging about it at dinner. Shall we abscond with it and ride off with all our ill-gotten spoils?”

“The local inspector will arrive to find eleven bodies, a looted mansion, and not a trace of the criminals,” Jenny said, mock-mournfully. “What a ghoulish sensation it will be.”

Trueman freed himself from the scarf with one yank. “Enough. Am I to understand that you have murdered _everyone_?”

“My assignment was to make sure the murderer wasn’t caught,” Jenny said. “Now whether you meant the assigned murderer, who is lying upstairs murdered before they had a chance to commit their wicked deed, or the actual murderers, who are the two of us escaping on a motorbike, I think you’ll agree that the murderer wasn’t caught.”

“I suppose you have the earrings,” Trueman said to Ann.

Ann lifted her hair to show him the earrings, swinging in place. They looked better on Jenny. But she could return them later. And pay borrowing-interest in kisses.

Jenny came back around the table to smile at him. 

He returned a glare, but Ann could tell he was softening. “Dammit, I recruit agents, not QCs. Legal loopholes in the rules are not the point of the exercise.”

“It was a loophole the size of Surrey,” Jenny said, “and if you don’t want legal minds, don’t recruit barristers.”

Ann was still digesting that, when she realised Trueman had started to laugh. “Go away,” he said, waving them away. “Escape on the motorbike. I have a bollocking to deliver to a pile of corpses, and then I have to resurrect everyone so they can actually have a chance to complete their assignments. Be back for dinner.”

“Yes, sir,” Jenny said, saluting sharply.

Ann made a break for the door before Trueman could change his mind. A motorbike ride through the stunning countryside – and perhaps an afternoon picnic, complete with picnic-blanket kissing? – sounded like heaven. 

“Thanks, partner,” Jenny said, in a faux American-gangster accent, as they rounded the corner of the house and headed for the garage.

“You’re welcome,” Ann said, and succumbed to the urge to push Jenny against the side of the house and lean in to kiss her silly.

Jenny kissed back, sunshine and spark, as the earrings jingled in Ann’s ears.

~//~

_epilogue_

Lord Trueman took the call himself. The kind of wealth Mr. Rafiel possessed opened many doors to him, even at the highest level of government departments.

When he heard what Mr. Rafiel required, he thought for a moment, and then a slow smile began to spread across his face. “Two bodyguards?” he repeated. 

“Money is no object,” Mr. Rafiel said, his voice weak but still determined. “But they must be immensely competent, and invisible. I don’t want the person they’re protecting to realise their identity, certainly at first. It might compromise the investigation, and put lives at risk.”

“Mr. Rafiel,” the man who went by the name Lord Trueman said, remembering the disruption of his last training dinner, “I think I have just the right pair of agents for you.”

This Miss Marple of Mr. Rafiel’s would be in the best hands.

~//~


End file.
